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Lorence's examination of Boileau's political career begins with his service as a Wisconsin district attorney in the 1920s, continues through his active congressional career in the 1930s, and concludes with his final years as a Wisconsin circuit judge. The book also addresses such important political issues faced by Congress as farm policy, military relations, foreign policy, monetary inflation, and unemployment relief. Using archival research and statistical analysis of congressional roll calls, Lorence investigates Boileau's maturation as a legislator and skilled practitioner of independent bloc politics.
Focusing on Michigan during the Great Depression, this book highlights the efforts of community organizers and activists in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to mobilize the jobless for mass action. In doing so, it demonstrates the relationship between unemployed activism and the rise of industrial unionism. Moreover, by discussing Communist and Socialist initiatives on behalf of displaced workers, the book illuminates the impact of radicalism on social change and shows how political claims influenced the cultural discourse of the 1930s. The book not only helps fill a void in our knowledge of community activism, worker culture, and labor history in the 1930s but also sheds light on the New Deal's domestication of American labor and the channeling of mass protest toward politically and socially acceptable goals. The UAW acceptance of responsibility for the underclass of the 1930s raises pertinent questions for labor in the 1990s.
When Movements Matter accounts for the origins of Social Security as we know it. The book tells the overlooked story of the Townsend Plan--a political organization that sought to alleviate poverty and end the Great Depression through a government-provided retirement stipend of $200 a month for every American over the age of sixty. Both the Townsend Plan, which organized two million older Americans into Townsend clubs, and the wider pension movement failed to win the generous and universal senior citizens' pensions their advocates demanded. But the movement provided the political impetus behind old-age policy in its formative years and pushed America down the track of creating an old-age welfare state. Drawing on a wealth of primary evidence, historical detail, and arresting images, Edwin Amenta traces the ups and downs of the Townsend Plan and its elderly leader Dr. Francis E. Townsend in the struggle to remake old age. In the process, Amenta advances a new theory of when social movements are influential. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that U.S. old-age policy was a result mainly of the Depression or farsighted bureaucrats. It also debunks the current view that America immediately embraced Social Security when it was adopted in 1935. And it sheds new light on how social movements that fail to achieve their primary goals can still influence social policy and the way people relate to politics.
Concentrated in states outside the Northeast and the South, state-level third-party radical politics has been more widespread than many realize. In the 1920s and 1930s, American political organizations strong enough to mount state-wide campaigns, and often capable of electing governors and members of Congress, emerged not only in Minnesota but in Wisconsin and Washington, in Oklahoma and Idaho, and in several other states. Richard M. Valelly treats in detail the political economy of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (1918-1944), the most successful radical, state-level party in American history. With the aid of numerous interviews of surviving organizers and participants in the party's existence, Valelly recreates the party's rise to power and subsequent decline, seeking answers to some broad, developmental questions. Why did this type of politics arise, and why did it collapse when it did? What does the party's history tell us about national political change? The answers lie, Valelly argues, in America's transition from the political economy of the 1920s to the New Deal. Combining case study and comparative state politics, he reexamines America's political economy prior to the New Deal and the scope and ironies of the New Deal's reorganization of American politics. The results compellingly support his argument that the federal government's increasing intervention in the economy profoundly transformed state politics. The interplay between national economy policy-making and federalism eventually reshaped the dynamics of interest-group politics and closed off the future of "state-level radicalism." The strength of this argument is highlighted by Valelly's cross-national comparison with Canadian politics. In vivid contrast to the fate of American movements, "province level radicalism" thrived in the Canadian political environment. In the course of analyzing one of the "supressed alternatives" of American politics, Valelly illuminates the influence of the national political economy on American political development. Radicalism in the States will interest students of economic protest, of national policy-making, of interest-group politics and party politics.
Details the achievements of left-wing politics in the USA, from effective opposition to militarism to the winning of racial justice and from the socialists of the 1960s to President Barack Obama.
The relationship between welfare and racial inequality has long been understood as a fight between liberal and conservative forces. In The Segregated Origins of Social Security, Mary Poole challenges that basic assumption. Meticulously reconstructi
This essential guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal provides a wealth of information, analysis, biographical profiles, primary documents and current resources that will help students to understand this pivotal era in American history. The author, an expert on this age of U.S. history and politics, brings to life the traumatic period that began in 1929 and ended only with America's entrance into World War II in 1941. He carefully explains the causes of the Depression, the actions taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift America out of its economic morass, and the economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of the age. Following a chronology of events, a narrative overview examines the events of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Other topical essays address the causes and cure of the Depression, America's struggle against the Depression, the effect of the Depression on American politics, changes in society and culture during the Depression decade, and an evaluation of the New Deal from a contemporary perspective. Twenty-seven biographical profiles of key figures of the era, the text of ten important primary documents, a glossary of frequently cited terms, and an annotated bibliography of print and nonprint materials for student use complete the work. This work is an essential source for the most current thinking and resources on the Great Depression and the New Deal.
According to conventional wisdom, American social policy has always been exceptional--exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds us here that sixty years ago the United States led the world in spending on social provision. He combines history and political theory to account for this surprising fact--and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived. The orthodox view is that American social policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly "welfare" for the unemployed and generous "social security" for the elderly. However, Amenta shows that the New Deal was in fact a bold program of relief, committed to providing jobs and income support for the unemployed. Social security was, by comparison, a policy afterthought. By the late 1930s, he shows, the U.S. pledged more of its gross national product to relief programs than did any other major industrial country. Amenta develops and uses an institutional politics theory to explain how social policy expansion was driven by northern Democrats, state-based reformers, and political outsiders. And he shows that retrenchment in the 1940s was led by politicians from areas where beneficiaries of relief were barred from voting. He also considers why some programs were nationalized, why some states had far-reaching "little New Deals," and why Britain--otherwise so similar to the United States--adopted more generous social programs. Bold Relief will transform our understanding of the roots of American social policy and of the institutional and political dynamics that will shape its future.
History tells us that World War II united Americans, but as in other conflicts it was soon back to politics as usual. Nancy Beck Young argues that the illusion of cooperative congressional behavior actually masked internecine party warfare over the New Deal. Young takes a close look at Congress during the most consensual war in American history to show how its members fought intense battles over issues ranging from economic regulation to social policies. Her book highlights the extent of-and reasons for-liberal successes and failures, while challenging assumptions that conservatives had gained control of legislative politics by the early 1940s. It focuses on the role of moderates in modern American politics, arguing that they, not conservatives, determined the outcomes in key policy debates and also established the methods for liberal reform that would dominate national politics until the early 1970s. Why We Fight--which refers as much to the conflicts between lawmakers as to war propaganda films of Frank Capra—unravels the tangle of congressional politics, governance, and policy formation in what was the defining decade of the twentieth century. It demonstrates the fragility of wartime liberalism, the nuances of partisanship, and the reasons for a bifurcated record on economic and social justice policy, revealing difficulties in passing necessary wartime measures while exposing racial conservatism too powerful for the moderate-liberal coalition to overcome. Young shows that scaling back on certain domestic reforms was an essential compromise liberals and moderates made in order to institutionalize the New Deal economic order. Some programs were rejected-including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the Works Progress Administration—while others like the Wagner Act and economic regulation were institutionalized. But on other issues, such as refugee policy, racial discrimination, and hunting communist spies, the discord proved insurmountable. This wartime political dynamic established the dominant patterns for national politics through the remainder of the century. Impeccably researched, Young's study shows that we cannot fully appreciate the nuances of American politics after World War II without careful explication of how the legislative branch redefined the New Deal in the decade following its creation.
Wisconsin accounts for about two percent of the nation's total population, but its contribution to the history of working people and social reform extends far beyond these numbers. In the early years of the twentieth century, Wisconsin became a veritable laboratory for social and political reform, producing such landmark legislation as workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, and other laws that became models for several states and helped shape federal labor policies. The study of the history of labor also began in Wisconsin when University of Wisconsin economics professor John R. Commons started to document the history of work and labor in America. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin includes nearly one hundred selections covering the period from 1850 to 1990, illustrated by scores of historic photos, most of which have never before been reprinted. Editor Darryl Holter has included accounts of episodes that took place in more than twenty-five cities and towns in Wisconsin, including labor activities at such nationally known companies as Oscar Mayer, Kohler, Case, Allis-Chalmers, and Ray-O-Vac and workers as diverse as dairy farmers and university teaching assistants, lumberjacks and hosiery makers, municipal employees and paper mill workers. The result is a book that will fascinate and inform anyone interested in American labor history and economics, as well as in the personal stories that are part of any great societal change.